US security doctrine protects state power, not nation: Chomsky

The prime concern of the US government is the security of state power and the corporate sector, but not the security of the American people, states Noam Chomsky, the prominent American political commentator, Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to the professor, security "in the normal sense" should not be a basic factor in policy formation.

“The American security doctrine, based on constant struggle against numerous potential enemies, is evidently a cover for the US invasive operations.”

Noam Chomsky cites the former US government advisor Samuel Huntington, who wrote in 1981: "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine."

However, when the USSR collapsed and the much-talked-about "Russian threat" disappeared in 1989, nothing really changed in the US security doctrine and "a series of fraudulent pretexts for the invasion were concocted," notes Professor Chomsky in his article "Whose Security? How Washington Protects Itself and the Corporate Sector."

When the last Soviet president Gorbachev made a "quid pro quo" deal with US president Bush that allowed the unification of Germany and stopped NATO's eastward expansion, he could not imagine that Washington would soon break its promises without hesitation.

"Gorbachev was naturally outraged, but when he complained, he was instructed by Washington that this had only been a verbal promise, a gentleman’s agreement, hence without force. If he was naïve enough to accept the word of American leaders, it was his problem," writes Professor Chomsky.

With the silent approval of the West, NATO was extended up to Russia's borders. "Today, the world faces a serious crisis that is in no small measure a result of these policies," believes the expert.

The most dangerous "virus" that might "spread contagion," according to the US geostrategists, is the independent nationalism not under the US control, notes Noam Chomsky. Remarkably, stresses the expert, the US tends "to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has usually been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion." Thus, Saudi Arabia, indisputably the most extreme radical fundamentalist Islamic state, enjoys the support of its powerful western ally.

As a result of the US policy of attacking the "virus" of independent nationalism the states of Latin America were either destroyed or weakened to the point of bare survival. "From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the hemisphere," according to Noam Chomsky, and "much the same was true in the Middle East." The decision to attack the Vietnamese nationalism was as well based on the American elite's fear that the independent Vietnam, liberated from the French colonial rule, could "spread contagion" to the neighboring regions, especially to resource-rich Indonesia. "Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion." And these are only a few examples of implementation of the American foreign policy doctrine.

The most vicious aspect of Washington's security concept is that it tends to protect the state power from the American population, not defending the population from the state tyranny.

"State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast, the population is not secure from state power. A striking current illustration is the radical attack on the Constitution by the Obama administration’s massive surveillance program. It is, of course, justified by "national security." That is routine for virtually all actions of all states and so carries little information," emphasizes the professor.

In the face of the serious crisis in Europe it is the time to sweep away the ideological clouds and answer the question of how policy decisions are made honestly and realistically, stresses Noam Chomsky, and what the American nation can do to alter them before it is too late.